


A is for Apology

by voices_in_my_head



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 17:40:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voices_in_my_head/pseuds/voices_in_my_head
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every Avengers has his way of apologizing for the deaths they've caused.</p>
<p>"Apologies aren’t given, they’re avoided."</p>
            </blockquote>





	A is for Apology

**Author's Note:**

> Exactly what the summary says. Also, the sentence in the beggining of the work is a Portuguese saying, but translated doesn't really have the same meaning ... But I think it goes with this work.

_Apologies aren’t given, they’re avoided._

**1) Tony Stark**

The fact that the weapons he was helping making were killing people wasn’t something Tony thought of. He knew it, of course, but he guessed he had been naïve at that. Believing that his weapons were killing other killers; never innocent people. Who was him to say who was innocent or wasn’t?

Tony Stark had a lot of fans, and Iron Man even more (not that he would ever admit it), but there were the ones who hated him too, and Iron Man. (The fact that inside his mind he divided himself and Iron Man was to be discussed to no one.)

He understood that hate, hell, sometimes, normally when he was drunk, he hated himself too. There had been times, while growing up, where he had thought if that hate would ever truly pass. On the really bad days, when he was beyond drunk to having amnesias the next day, he really believed that. That he had just become a better liar.

On the days that that didn’t happen, which were beginning to happen more and more, he thought of ways to balance it. He didn’t believe in karma, but that didn’t mean that he thought that all the deaths he had caused should be forgotten.

Not that he used actually numbers, of course. There were some things that not even drugged up he could handle.

His company stopped making weapons and started helping others, making the technology better and better but also trying to arrange new forms of energy.

At the end of the day he wasn’t sure that he had done anything good, but those days were passing. Maybe when he was sixty, the fact that he once had the nickname of Merchant of Death wouldn’t bother him anymore.

**2) Captain America (Steve Rogers)**

After the first time he commanded soldiers into battle Steve dreamed of Bucky’s words. _This isn’t a back alley. It’s war._

At the time he just thought Bucky didn’t want him with him (what? He had been bullied all his life, he was used to people not wanting him around), but after that first night he understood.

They saw all those commercials on the cinema and thought: hey, going to war, that’s not so bad, is it? You’ll be helping your country.

The fact that people died there; that you killed people, didn’t really register to his mind until it was too late.

He wants to believe that if he had known of the blood he would spill, he wouldn’t have done it. He tries and tries to force those words onto his mind, but no matter what, he can’t lie to himself.

After his second mission he decided he needed to do something to cope with it, or he would go crazy. He would like to pray for their souls, because even if they were the enemy, they were still humans. Because it could have been him (it couldn’t because of the serum, but back then, that fact hadn’t registered yet), or Bucky, or any of the others that were expecting him to lead them there and back again safe. But he didn’t know how many they were, or their names, or anything really, except that they had had a gun pointed at him and his companions.

So he gave all his money. He slept at the base and they gave him food and clothes, so he didn’t’ really needed it. It wasn’t much but still… he found ways to give it to the families that were suffering in Germany.

He thought of Peggy while he sunk the plane but also about the families. That maybe they hadn’t received the money or hadn’t wanted to use it, knowing from where it came, because he had put his name with every envelope.

When Steve wakes up they tell him they won the war, and he imagines if any member of the families he sent money survived. Then he finds out there’s still a war going on, that all those lives lost meant nothing, no matter what Fury and all the others suits tell him.

There’s a part of him that wants to throw the shield away and the suit, but he can’t just forget what he is. Still, he tells Fury that he isn’t going back to war.

Then he discovers his enemies aren’t from this world and he returns to sending money. It isn’t just about helping other survive, he admits, it’s because it reminds him that he can still do some good without any killing. That the world hasn’t changed that much; that there are still people that need him to send them money. He wonders when that thought became a comforting one.

**3) Bruce Banner (Hulk)**

He doesn’t like calling the other guy Hulk because it wasn’t him who gave him the name. He doesn’t know who did, but he has his suspicions that it was General Ross, and that is just another reason for him not to do it.

It’s just the other guy; his other part. The moment the experience went wrong he knew the other guy wouldn’t be like him. A calm guy. It was quite the opposite actually. But that he was a killer… it wasn’t something he wanted to deal with, to be honest.

For some time he was able to differentiate himself from the other guy. It was easy since he didn’t remember any of the events, so how could he be to blame? But then he started remembering. Small parts in the beginning, a building, a sound, and then the big parts, until he was there. Not able to control his body, but _there._

It became hard, after that, to pretend he and the other guy were different people. Like two roommates, but that had separate lives.

So he tried to make himself stopping from transforming into the other guy, but of course that didn’t work for very long. Sometimes he transformed for small things, other times for big ones. Sometimes there weren’t deaths, sometimes there were.

Bruce was a scientist, but he lived in the real world. This meant that people dying every day wasn’t exactly something new, but him being the cause…

He dreamed of the ones he/the other guy (there were days when he just stopped trying to differentiate them) had killed, of their families. The nights where he couldn’t give them a face because he had been that quick to kill, were the worse.

So he tried to kill himself. As far as he was concerned he was doing the world a favor. There was nothing he could do that would ever get them back, or, more important, make him stop hating himself.

It didn’t work. Of course it didn’t. The other guy would never allow it.

So once again he tried to stop himself from changing, but also to help other people. He stopped being a scientist and became a doctor. He didn’t have a degree because going to college was too dangerous but he read every book he could and the lives he saved were far more than the ones he lost.

It still wasn’t enough, for everyone he saved, the other guy killed two. There was no apology he could give to those families. To himself. But sometimes, just sometimes, he really believed that one day the count wouldn’t be as big. That he would be able to handle one day without hating himself. One day.

**4) Hawkeye (Clint Barton)**

The day Clint Barton received an offer from S.H.I.E.L.D. was a Wednesday. It had been raining for the past few days and all he wanted was to be at home under the blankets. But he didn’t have a home, he lived at the circus.

When he received the job offer he didn’t think twice before accepting. He didn’t think of what the word “agent” meant.

Then the training began, and he realized it wasn’t with the word agent he should concern himself. It was with assassin.

Killing somebody at a distance wasn’t as hard as it was up close. At a distance you didn’t hear their heart stopping, you didn’t see their eyes begging. You just saw their bodies falling.

He was good with weapons, hell, amazing, as well as with a bow and arrows. The fact that he was also amazing with a knife wasn’t known by many.

S.H.I.E.L.D. agents didn’t like him very much because they had to fight their way up (to the next body, not rank) while Hawkeye just stayed in the shadows waiting for the next victim.

Clint didn’t care what they thought. He wasn’t like them. These agents… they were humans, he had to admit, but they weren’t normal (a word he hadn’t believed the meaning until entering S.H.I.E.L.D.). He wasn’t either, but it took him a while to accept it.

Natasha wasn’t the first one he let live. After his fifth killing he started digging up his marks history. It turned out his fifth victim, a man called Warren Boyd, had a wife and three children. He was also in the arms dealer business but Clint believed that if he could go back in time he wouldn’t have killed him.

He never met with any of his mark’s families. Never tried to contact them or apologize. For once because he had no idea what he would say, and for second… he knew they would (did) hate him, but knowing it and seeing it were two different things.

So he made sure he wasn’t just another suit. That the people he killed really deserved it. There were still mistakes; people he believed could have been saved, but for the most part he believed he did the right thing.

**5) Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff)**

She doesn’t remember playing with dolls. Watching TV. Reading books. Instead, she remembers learning how to use a gun. Being able to throw a knife with her eyes closed. Knowing more than twenty ways to how to kill a man with her bare hands before she was twelve.

She killed her first man when she was eight, but at the time it hadn’t quite the same meaning. Actually, it did, it was during the journey from that time to now that it was different.

She remembered putting a knife through his heart. His blood had left her hands easier than paint. Not that she used paint very often, but still…

She remembered thinking that her teachers had been wrong. That everybody on Earth who spoke couldn’t be human, because that man wasn’t like him. She would have never let somebody kill her so easily.

It was four years later that she began to question death and life. While other girls were worrying about makeup and when their period would first appear, she was reading books about life, death, religions and spirits. Her teachers just thought she was looking up new ways to kill her marks.

It wasn’t until she was sixteen that she came to some sort of answer. She didn’t believe in the catholic God or any other. In second lives. Hell, most time she didn’t even believe in second chances.

Sometimes she wondered if she should stop killing; or at least question the reasons. But it was what she did; who she was. So instead every time she killed somebody she just left a rose behind. Some were found by the police, some weren’t. They all thought it was her just bragging.

It wasn’t. It was just her honoring them. Apologizing.

**6) Thor**

In Asgard there is no greater honor than being a warrior. Dying as a warrior, fighting for their people is the greatest good anybody can do. Thor never questioned it; not like his brother did.

It was their costumes, so why should he change them?

He was doing what their ancestors did. Their father.

Before he had been sent to Earth life didn’t have the same meaning as it did now. Most Asgardians died in war; almost never of disease and of old age… well, when that happened they were celebrated.

When people were alive, they were. When they weren’t, they were just gone.

It was a simple principle and Thor had never seen any reason to doubt it.

Before being sent to Earth he started fights, sometimes even wars, without really thinking of the consequences. Just of the feasts made in his honor. Before Earth he had hated the Jotuns and wanted them all dead.

When he came back that was what his brother was doing. He knows that if his brother had tried doing this before, he would have helped him. And if he hadn’t it would just because of the Bifrost; not because he didn’t want an entire race to perish.

After that, people who died in wars still deserved to be honored. Dying in a battle was the greatest honor. He just started choosing his battles more carefully.

After Phil Coulson’s funeral he went with the other Avengers at a pub and drank in his memory, even though he hadn’t really known him and couldn’t really get drunk.

Except instead of telling great stories about him the ones who knew him just stayed silent. So he did too.

And the next time somebody died in a battle they did it again. And again. 

Centuries after that Thor still stayed a moment in silence to honor the ones that had left.

 


End file.
